Cakewalk has announced the availability of a fully native 64-bit version of SONAR 4 Producer Edition. The x64 Technology Preview version of SONAR 4 includes the entire application, along with a collection of additional DirectX effects, synths, and samplers to spotlight the advantages of music production in a 64-bit processing environment.

Cakewalk's implementation extends the amount of RAM available for music production on the PC to 1 terabyte (1024 GB), well beyond the current 2 GB limit offered by today's 32-bit applications. This provides users with nearly unlimited potential for working with RAM intensive projects that make extensive use of samplers and numerous audio loops and tracks. SONAR x64 Technology Preview provides users with the ability to load entire, large sample banks, libraries, and audio clips into RAM, thereby eliminating the latency introduced by disk streaming. Additionally, future versions of SONAR will offer the highest resolution mix engine with a fidelity exceeding that of the most expensive professional audio tools available in the market today.

"We are very excited to be on the forefront of delivering x64 technology to the music production world, and have found Intel processor-based Hewlett Packard platforms are ideal for delivering outstanding performance benefits to empower musicians." commented Ron Kuper, Vice President of Engineering for Cakewalk. "In our testing not only are we seeing SONAR make more effective use of RAM, but as an added bonus we are also seeing reduced CPU overhead, which we believe to be the result of the increased number of internal registers within x64 processors," added Kuper.